


The Way Of The Saints

by fourfreedoms



Category: Carnivale, Supernatural
Genre: Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-15
Updated: 2009-12-15
Packaged: 2017-10-04 11:00:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourfreedoms/pseuds/fourfreedoms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam is Ben's successor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way Of The Saints

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally concieved a lighthearted Circus-type AU. But um, I felt like torturing myself and putting this in the same atmosphere as Carnivale rather than SPN.

The name is written inside his eyelids, in the desperate space of his dreams. He knows exactly where _he_ is—how many miles to drive, and how many steps to walk, the same way he can find his nose on his face. He also knows, as with many things in his life, he has waited far too long.

He finds him in the sun-burnt gold hills of Northern California smoking a slim cigarette in the shade of a Eucalyptus. When their eyes meet in the fading 6'o clock light, he is glad that Sam already knows about sin made flesh and the devil's work wrought in the land. It was more than he came to the table with, and he's sure his explanations would only be feeble to those who don't _know_.

"I'm not the guy you think I am," Sam says, fishes in the pocket of his white summer suit to offer Ben a cigarette.

Ben sighs, because he remembers being here himself, but they don't have enough time for this. "And the dreams? The ones of the yellow-eyed man?"

Sam huffs out a breath, doesn't ask how he knows. "Just dreams."

"What happens when you touch people, Winchester? They's just dreams too?"

Sam throws his butt to the ground and grinds it out with his heel. "I left it behind, you hafta understand."

"I kin understand," Ben says, scrubs his hand through his dusty hair. "But it ain't somethin' that stays behind when you tell it to."

But Sam is more stubborn than Ben was, and he walks off into the twilight without a glance back. He knows that Sam has a brother and a daddy he doesn't speak to, much like management knew the day Ben's mother was going to die. If Sam's family couldn't bring him to heel, Ben doesn't have much faith that he'll be able to.

When he gets back his shirt is already soaked through with blood and the threads have split. Sutures barely held for two days this time. With a certain desperation he knocks back whiskey and tries not to think about corn fields.

He goes back to the green watered lawns of Stanford the next day. "Winchester, you gotta hear me out," he calls after him when he spots him walking across the campus. Sam stops and Ben's glad—Sam doesn't have any of the hard edges he'd cultivated at that age. They'll never get anywhere if Sam has even half of Ben's reticence in those early days.

"I'm telling you, you're looking for somebody else."

"I ain't," Ben shook his head. "Would that I was, but I know it's you."

Sam blows out a breath and twists his hat around in his hands. "I got nothing for you."

"Your mother, she burned down your nursery when you was just six months old, died trying to take you with her," Ben say, hand on his elbow. "Now you tell me that ain't true."

Sam looks down at his palms. "I can't."

Ben tries his best at comfort. "Sam, 'tweren't your fault, just the nature of what it's like to be us."

"What is it you want?" Sam whispers.

Ben jerks his head in the direction of where the carnival is camped. "Take a walk with me?"

*

When the brother comes for Sam, he's doing the best he can to stitch Ben's wounds. Ben's used to pain, he's got the scars on his ankles from leg irons to prove it, but the sutures tearing and needing to be re-stitched every day is more than pain, it's wrongness. He feels like fabric with an unraveling thread, slowly dwindling down to a rag.

When Sam's brother slams into the Sam's small rented room at the boarding house, he's stopped in his tracks by Sam desperately closing Ben's wounds with boiled horsehair and the slimmest needle he could find. Sam doesn't even look up, just continues pulling the needle through Ben's flesh. Ben remembers how the more time he spent with Management the harder it got to sneak up on him. He wonders how long Sam has known Dean was coming—before the cornfields Ben would've known for days.

"Hello, Dean," Sam said after a long moment of silence. "Close the door behind you."

Dean stares at Sam with his perfect white shirt sleeves rolled up around his elbows, Ben's torn and bleeding flesh, and he shakes his head. "What have you gotten into now, Sammy?" His voice has notes of the same southern roll of Ben's own drawl, but with a curious Midwestern mix, an odd emphasis on the vowels that Ben can't pin down.

"Your brother's just doin' me a favor," Ben says, shrugging up onto his elbows. Sam pulls the last knot tight and places cotton pads torn from worn sheets everywhere the gashes have marred his flesh.

Sam gets up and washes his hands in the small sink basin. "What do you need, Dean?"

*

It turns out that what Dean needs is his brother. When Ben swears up and down, left and right that the Winchester Patriarch is alive and about as far from California as possible, he doesn't say his thanks and leave. He remains at Sam's side, brown flannel suit dark to Sam's light.

Ben has seen a lot to pass judgement over, people cheating and killing and raping and thieving in this starving time, now as the world draws ever closer to war. He's seen a lot to forgive too, and the way Dean Winchester looks when he meets the local girl Sam's been courting, a tall blonde thing who should be strong but is as soft and malleable as gold with her perfect white gloves and her delicate hose with the seams done up straight—the way Dean looks when he meets her, well that's forgivable. Because Dean is an open book, the sections on love drawn up in bright red ink. The compassion Sam has for the world, humanity, is rivaled only by the love his brother has for him.

He doesn't know why Sam left, but when he gets a spare moment alone, after they're done pouring over Management's manuscripts he asks.

Ben is surprised he knows the answer before it leaves Sam's lips. "Wanted to be my own person, with no one's weight on my shoulders but my own." And now, Sam has found, he is Atlas, duty bound to hold up the weight of the entire world.

*  
Ben wakes up one morning, knowing that time is slipping away. He no longer has the strength to fight on any longer, and the threat of that blazing tower in the desert electrifying and destroying everything in its path has not gone away like he thought it would with the defeat of the Usher. It's time to pass on the boon, and there's only one way that can go.

Sam and Dean finally set out on the road after their father because Ben says he foresees danger for him. And Ben plays all his best cards, all his most nervy moves, he tries to set up Sam the same way that Management set up him. He disguises himself in the body of the yellow-eyed man to get the Winchesters where he wants him. When he drops the illusion and pins John to a wall with all his strength, threatening his life with the anointed blade, Sam pleads with him, but it's not enough.

Ben miscalculated. He poked the cattle-prod into the heart of their little family, but it was Dean who cried out. Dean shoots his shoulder full of buckshot, and Ben is forced to get out quick, because he needs Sam to take his life, not his fool of a brother.

*

They go deep underground after that, and Ben has to do his very best not to die until Sam is ready for him to. He hears that John Winchester tangled with the yellow-eyed-man and lost, but he can't read where or how or when. Sam doesn't want him to know.

He starts hearing stories, colored folk being saved from the klan from south to deep south, poor prostitutes finally making their way in off the streets, and soup kitchens popping up all along the bread belt for those who pass through. Ben knows it's them. They're atoning for something. He'll never know what.

*

When Dean turns up, Sam's body limp and dead in the back of their fancy black Daimler—the only thing left from their old life—Ben's blood runs cold. He walks away from the car, his heart already reaching out to find the next Prince. There won't be enough time. It's been stretched too thin.

"You bring him back, you horse's ass," Dean says. "I know you can."

Ben turns around and suddenly he knows how to spring the trap. "You want him back?"

Dean falls to his knees, voice breaking. "How can you even ask?"

"I could take his life from you," Ben tells him. He watches Dean flinch, but knows he's ready to accept. Ben knows what Sam will do when he finds his brother dead.

"Is that the only way?" Dean asks, expression just the barest hint of frightened. When Ben shrugs and bends down to place his hands on Sam's back, Dean is resigned. "Do it."

Dean falls to his knees the minute Ben's hands touch Sam's skin above the knife wound. He chokes and gasps, and if there was any other way to make Sam do what he has to do, then Ben would do it. Because he doesn't want to take this from him, it's all Sam ever had. And having is almost worse than going without, because once it's taken away it's like the world stops.

Sam shudders to life as his brother collapses at his feet. "Sammy," falling past his lips as his heart stops.

Sam's eyes snag on his brother, and Ben feels the weight of a crushing fury. He barely has time to prepare when Sam picks up the pistol belted at his brother's waist and shoots him in the gut and again through the heart. "How could you?" he asks, eyeing the blue blood blossoming on Ben's worn and dirty shirt.

It's not the how, but the why. He feels everything he is being swallowed up by Sam just like it's supposed to. For a fleeting moment, he fancies he is Sam. And the worst thing in the entire world, worse than prison, worse than all his nightmares, worse than standing amid the wrongness of his father's legacy, worse than going toe to toe with Brother Justin, worse than watching Sophie swallowed up by something vicious and black, is the feeling of Sam's forgiveness for causing him the harshest pain a body can feel—the loss of his brother.

Sam forgives him, even as rage spills out of him and cracks the sky open until water pours down. Because that is the nature of their kind. Compassion always costs more than hate when the devil doesn't love. And Ben realizes in his last moments, neither will Sam, ever again, because he may forgive, but he will never forget.

*


End file.
